Epidemiological Characteristics of COVID-19 in Mexico and the Potential Impact of Lifting Confinement Across Regions

  1. Cristy Leonor Azanza Ricardo
  2. Esteban A. Hernandez-Vargas

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Abstract

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has paralyzed our societies, leading to self-isolation and quarantine for several days. As the 10th most populated country in the world, Mexico is on a major threat by COVID-19 due to the limitations of intensive care capacities, about 1.5 hospital beds for every 1,000 citizens. In this paper, we characterize the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico and projected different scenarios to evaluate sharp or gradual quarantine lifting strategies. Mexican government relaxed strict social distancing regulations on June 1, 2020, deriving to pandemic data with large fluctuations and uncertainties of the tendency of the pandemic in Mexico. Our results suggest that lifting social confinement must be gradually sparse while maintaining a decentralized region strategy among the Mexican states. To substantially lower the number of infections, simulations highlight that a fraction of the population that represents the elderly should remain in social confinement (approximately 11.3% of the population); a fraction of the population that represents the confined working class (roughly 27% of the population) must gradually return in at least four parts in consecutive months; and to the last a fraction of the population that assumes the return of students to schools (about 21.7%). As the epidemic progresses, deconfinement strategies need to be continuously re-adjusting with the new pandemic data. All mathematical models, including ours, are only a possibility of many of the future, however, the different scenarios that were developed here highlight that a gradual decentralized region deconfinement with a significant increase in healthcare capacities is paramount to avoid a high death toll in Mexico.

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  1. Version published to 10.3389/fphy.2020.573322
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.28.20115063: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Therefore, COVID-19 is a major threat to developing countries because of limitations of intensive care beds. While no vaccine or antiviral drug is likely to be available soon, the only remaining tool against COVID-19 is social confinement. However, a prolonged lock-down will hugely affect societies, education, and economy. In this paper, we take as a case study Mexico, which adopted on March 15 social confinement to avoid the fast spread of the virus and the eventual collapse of the public health services12. Mexico is a highly populated country with major levels of moderate poverty. A strict social confinement has been extremely difficult to apply in a country with 56.2% of the population working informally11. Mexico will lift the social confinement on 1 June 2020, however, the consequent waves of infections are eminent and an abruptly de-confinement would result in high death tolls in a limited public health system. On March 24, an official communication24 reported that 40% of the available hospital beds in the country were dedicated to the COVID-19 epidemy. That is, a total of 49,083 hospital beds, 256 intensive care units, 5,523 ventilators and 2,446 intensive care beds. Furthermore, a re-conversion program is in process, to increase the health capacity24. In spite of social confinement, our results point out a high threat to Mexico (Figure 1), that is for the most optimistic scenario, the pandemic peak would be about 338 thousand infected people. If the ratios of hospital...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.28.20115063v1 on medRxiv